The Cheapest Time to Buy a Laptop Was Last Year
Some price increases don't announce themselves. Nothing's out of stock. Nothing's discontinued. The thing on the shelf looks exactly like the one you nearly bought eighteen months ago. It just costs more — or costs the same and quietly holds less.
That's what the memory shortage has done to consumer electronics, and it's worth getting your head around before your next purchase, because the standard advice to wait for a better price has stopped working.
What happened
Three companies make memory chips at scale: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. AI data centres are buying staggering volumes of high-margin memory, and all three have swung capacity toward that business. The RAM and storage headed for laptops, phones and consoles is fighting over the leftovers.
The numbers are genuinely absurd. A 32GB DDR5 desktop kit that went for under $90 in early 2025 was fetching several hundred dollars by early 2026. On the manufacturing side, a Google exec cited RAM going from $2.80 in 2025 to roughly $12 in 2026 — a 16GB package climbing from $45 to $192.
Where you see it
Gartner expects PC prices up about 17% and smartphones up about 13% in 2026 against 2025, and thinks those increases will actually shrink global shipments. People aren't swallowing the cost. They're walking away.
Consoles make it obvious, because their prices are public and almost never move. PS5 sits at $649, Xbox Series X at $799.99. The Nintendo Switch 2 is confirmed to go to $499.99 on 1 September 2026, which is one of the few firm dates anyone weighing a purchase actually has.
The increase you can't see
Here's the more useful bit: not everyone is raising prices. Some brands are holding the number steady and giving you less for it — less memory, less storage, same model name, same sticker.
That's shrinkflation with a spec sheet, and it breaks the way most people shop. Compare this year's model to last year's on price alone and you'll conclude nothing changed. The change is three lines down the page.
So the single most valuable habit right now is checking the memory and storage config of whatever you're eyeing against the same model from a year or two back. That comparison tells you the truth. The price doesn't.
Who eats it
Cheap phones, disproportionately. Memory makes up a much bigger slice of the cost in a $200 device than a $1,200 one, so component increases land hardest at the bottom. A budget phone has nowhere to hide it.
The knock-on effect is that budget buyers are being pushed toward refurbished and second-hand handsets, or toward simply keeping what they've got. Both are sensible. A good refurbished phone from two generations back is, at today's prices, unusually strong value next to a new budget model.
What to actually do
Waiting isn't the free move it normally is. New fabs won't add meaningful supply until 2027 or 2028, so there's no correction coming that's worth holding out for. If you need a machine within the next year, buying sooner beats waiting.
If you genuinely can wait, wait properly — plan on keeping your current device another eighteen months, not another two. A short delay gets you the worst of both.
And whatever you buy, buy the memory. It's the one component you can't upgrade on most modern laptops and can't touch on any phone, it's exactly what's being quietly trimmed, and it's what decides whether the thing is still usable in four years. Paying up for RAM and storage now is the version of this decision that ages best.
Image: Sergei Starostin, via Pexels
